travisp

It seems very likely that it's possible to force people into lucid dreaming. However, it seems that any external methods rely on external cues during REM sleep and I'd worry that in doing so you might be subtly reducing quality of REM sleep.

Yes, rickets and osteomalacia (when caused by vitamin d deficiency) are both treatable with vitamin d. Randomized controlled trials clearly show this, unlike the vitamin d trials for most other things that people are pushing vitamin d for.

Everyone should probably have their blood level of vitamin d tested. Most people are not going to see dramatic changes to health from vitamin d supplementation.

Yet nearly every controlled trial supplementing Vitamin D has limited or no effect, except maybe in the most deficient people. Many many trials have been conducted. Vitamin D advocates always have an excuse — it’s too little vitamin D; no, actually you also have to add Vitamin K2; etc

Part of the problem of all the observational trials looking at vitamin d is that low vitamin d is a biomarker for being less healthy. People who are ill spend less time outdoors. People who spend more time outdoors are already healthier and are also getting other benefits from their outdoor activities.

You can try to control for all of these things, but every time we actually try to test what happens if you give people Vitamin D, we find almost no benefit.

Methotrexate is standard of care, considered “strongly recommended” over hydroxychloroquine (source: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/acr.24596 ) for rheumatoid arthritis. If I read the paper right, hydroxychloroquine may be favored in “low disease” states.

So I would certainly expect some sort of difference in patient population. It would suggest those initiated on hydroxychloroquine would normally have less severe rheumatoid arthritis (or have some other difference that their doctor would choose to not use methotrexate by default), although I don’t know if that’s the case in reality.

Yes, my wife is an emergency medicine doctor. She frequently ends up wearing her mask in the car and other places where it’s unnecessary until I remind her she’s wearing it.

You're asking me to comment on the entire theory, I think. I'm only commenting on the value of an unseen intelligence report of unknown source. None of what you've said increases the validity of this report.

Everyone commenting on this post is acting immediately as if this report is 100% true, but the reality is that we know very little about the report.

Maybe. But this is according to a paraphrase of unverified (possibly not even American) intelligence. Both the document's authority and origin are disputed, and the WSJ can't even say which department or agency wrote this. This does not seem like any sort of official US intelligence report.

A reasonable look at this particular claim and the history of similar types of claims: https://twitter.com/pwnallthethings/status/13965771532323799...

This isn't hard for to check. Yes, basically all research on RaTG13 did appear after the Covid pandemic, as you would naturally expect given that scientists were interested in it given the similarity. Nobody was interested in the RaTG13 previously.

However, the evidence is pretty clear that this was found and published earlier. It was originally described as "BtCoV/4991" and it was described and published as far as I can find as far back as 2016. (The name was changed to RaTG13 to describe that it was collected in 2013 in Tongguan).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/983856042 <-- partial RaTG13 sequence in 2016

And the decline has not been because of a lack of testing. Since late September, 1.3 million specimens have been tested for influenza, more than the average of about one million in the same period in recent years.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/04/22/science/flu-s...

My wife is also an ER doctor and agrees that there were times that they didn't perform many/any flu tests--mostly in the spring of 2020 and after none of the flu tests were returning positive for a while. But this past winter people have definitely been tested for the flu. Rapid influenza tests are also usually performed first, only sending to labs when confirmatory testing is desired.

This is just wrong. Vastly more tests were done for the flu during the covid pandemic than have ever been done.

I too rarely got sick for years, even with international travel. Until I had kids, which I notice you don't mention anywhere in your comment.

That would have nothing to do with HIPAA. HIPAA generally only covers patient information held by health providers, payers, etc. It only applies to "covered entities", which is a specific set of entities. It's a myth that HIPAA applies to health information generally. There's even dispute about whether or not HIPAA applies to doctors and medical services who don't accept insurance ( https://www.lebauerconsulting.com/hipaa-is-my-cash-practice-... )

(although some states have more strict health privacy laws)

"Physician and clinical services" includes far more than pay for US doctors -- it's the entire costs for "services provided in establishments operated by Doctors of Medicine (M.D.) and Doctors of Osteopathy (D.O.), outpatient care centers, plus the portion of medical laboratories services that are billed independently by the laboratories". Doctors do not get even close to all of that money paid to them.

In fact, physicians represent about 15% - 16% of the top 1% of income earners in the US.

This may be accurate, I'm unsure, but it wouldn't change that if US doctors were paid the same as their European counterparts, it would not make a truly significant change in overall US medical spending (this would even be true if doctors did actually make up 20% of medical expenditures, like you assert earlier).

It's true that US doctors are paid more (although the gap isn't as big as it used to be). However, pay for US doctors makes up a fairly small portion of overall US medical expenditures (less than 10%). So, you could ask every doctor to work for free and not significantly change costs.

Many therapists don't write names in their psychotherapy notes, and instead use initials, and store them separately from records that require identifying information. It could be possible, but difficult to identify people from these records -- certainly not on a large scale like has happened here.

Nothing in the article suggests that you should not say no to your kids -- it just says that your kids will be upset about you saying no, which is probably beyond your control and therefore is a factor that will weigh in your decision. Your response seems to me like criticizing the whole article by saying "Even better, learn to have the willpower to just not eat the damn cookies".

You're missing how many people have gotten infected and where. If a region has not yet had substantial transmission of the coronavirus, then it won't have many deaths. This would also be like saying in August, "the flu has only killed 100 people, I guess the flu won't be very deadly this year."

Approximately 0.25% of NYC's entire population has died of COVID, which is significantly more than die of the seasonal flu.

Even if you're right (and finger count is a common example for students to teach the concept of heritability), this will run counter to what people think when they hear "heritability."

Most people wouldn't think "number of fingers is heritable because their propensity for risk taking is genetic" they would say it's because the number of fingers we are born with is genetic, which would be a mostly incorrect reason for any heritability statistic on number of fingers. I think your possible explanation about why number of fingers might be fairly heritable only reinforces my point about what most people understand about heritability.

And, for the same reason, while risk taking seems to be heritable, we don't know the particular genetic contribution to risk taking.

It's important to understand that the way many people understand heritability usually isn't what most scientific researchers mean when they say "heritable."

Heritability is an important concept in quantitative genetics, particularly in selective breeding and behavior genetics (for instance, twin studies). It is the source of much confusion due to the fact that its technical definition is different from its commonly-understood folk definition. Therefore, its use conveys the incorrect impression that behavioral traits are "inherited" or specifically passed down through the genes.

...

Heritability measures the fraction of phenotype variability that can be attributed to genetic variation. This is not the same as saying that this fraction of an individual phenotype is caused by genetics. For example, it is incorrect to say that since the heritability of personality traits is about .6, that means that 60% of your personality is inherited from your parents and 40% comes from the environment. In addition, heritability can change without any genetic change occurring, such as when the environment starts contributing to more variation...High heritability of a trait, consequently, does not necessarily mean that the trait is not very susceptible to environmental influences. Heritability can also change as a result of changes in the environment, migration, inbreeding, or the way in which heritability itself is measured in the population under study. The heritability of a trait should not be interpreted as a measure of the extent to which said trait is genetically determined in an individual.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability

I agree there are reasons to be concerned overall, but Tim Cook is very clearly stating in this interview, which happened after the nationalization, that 1) China doesn’t have access to the encryption keys themselves and 2) for much of the data (like messages) not even Apple has the keys, 3) China is not able to access the data any more easily than any other country.

If you are targeted by the CCP, then yes, they can make a “legal” request for the data of an individual that Apple is able the decrypt (which isn’t all of it), but they aren’t able to apply mass surveillance to the iCloud data.

No, they still don't have access to the encryption keys, as reported after those articles you post:

"Encryption for us is the same in every country in the world...We worked with a Chinese company to provide iCloud, but the keys [...] are ours...I wouldn't get caught up in 'where's the location of it,' I mean we have servers located in many different countries in the world. They're not easier to get data from being in one country versus the next...The key question is how does the encryption process work, and who owns the keys — if anyone. In most cases for us, you and the receiver [of a message] own the keys." - Tim Cook

(https://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-apple-encrypts-data...)

Apple is specifically stating that they have retained control over the encryption keys.

That link does not show that they've given control over encryption to the CCP. Apple is on record stating that they have not done this.

"Encryption for us is the same in every country in the world...We worked with a Chinese company to provide iCloud, but the keys [...] are ours...I wouldn't get caught up in 'where's the location of it,' I mean we have servers located in many different countries in the world. They're not easier to get data from being in one country versus the next...The key question is how does the encryption process work, and who owns the keys — if anyone. In most cases for us, you and the receiver [of a message] own the keys." - Tim Cook

(https://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-apple-encrypts-data...)

The article is misleading. Apple has not given the iCloud encryption keys to the Chinese government. As far as I'm aware, there is currently no evidence that the Chinese government is any more capable of accessing iCloud data than any other government.

From a later article from the same source, Apple states: "Apple has not created nor were we requested to create any backdoors and Apple will continue to retain control over the encryption keys to iCloud data"

https://money.cnn.com/2018/02/28/technology/apple-icloud-dat...

I'm not saying it's not concerning, and China can still request a particular users data, but let's be accurate.

The possibility that someone in the company is secretly (how!?) providing the Chinese government access to the encryption keys is a wildly different claim. There is no evidence that Apple has done it, and an important executive has testified that they have not, and they've publicly stated they haven't, even if you want to speculate that it has happened.

Apple has not handed over the iCloud keys and has testified in the US under penalty of perjury that they have not done this and not made an exception for China. Repeating this is dangerous because it’ll cause people to take different (probably less safe and private) actions based on incorrect information.

Have you ever checked your blood sugar on a zero carb diet? It’s far from zero.

This medication is intended to block glucose transport to cancer cells while not blocking to non-cancer cells. Even if a zero carb diet would be a good idea for a cancer patient in general, there is absolutely no chance that a zero carb diet would be equivalent to the intended mechanism of this medication because people with a zero carb diet still have plenty of glucose.

It's not just blood shortage in total numbers (which is a problem), but people who receive transfusions often develop additional antibodies, which makes it even harder for them to receive compatible blood in the future. There are actually millions of "varieties" of blood not just the 8 main types. It can be so hard to find a successful match that blood is sometimes shipped internationally. Emergency situations can be particularly difficult.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/your-blood-typ...

Homeschooling is a small effective class size, but my parents were by no means wonderful teachers (even though they are wonderful people). For homeschooling during 6th and 7th grades, I mostly used the purchased curriculum books myself without significant involvement from them. On a typical day, I probably received less instruction from my parents than a student in a regular classroom (sometimes no instruction).

It seems crazy to me that I was able to complete an entire days worth of lessons this way in the amount of time most 6th and 7th graders spend on homework alone.

Regardless, suppose studies were to show that adding hours of homework was necessary for students to be successful academically (and as far as I know they don't show this). Rather than deciding to destroy our children's free and unstructured time with homework, why don't we figure out how to change school so that this homework isn't necessary? It's clearly possible to generate well-educated and competitive children with significantly fewer hours of education per day. The homework is just a bandaid for something that isn't working (and probably not even as effective as a bandaid).

The biggest piece of data that speaks to me against hours of homework being generally necessary for learning and academic success is homeschooling (at least secular homeschooling). Many homeschooled children, especially pre-middle school, have academic periods that last for a maximum of a couple of hours. Yet, these children are able to integrate academically back into traditional schools and excel.

I'm one of these kids: I was homeschooled for several grades due to my family traveling, completed my lessons in just a couple of hours per day (sometimes doing two lessons in one day so I could take the next day off). I successfully transitioned to a regular high school (with plenty of homework), did great, and went to one of the top and most difficult universities in the country where I also did quite well. Even though I had hours of homework in high school, I didn't seem to suffer from not having spent 10 hours a day in middle school doing school plus homework. I wasn't "unprepared" or otherwise unable to handle the suddenly significantly higher workload.

Of course, this isn't very scientific and this also doesn't prove that homework isn't necessary in a traditional school, but it does suggest that something is very wrong in traditional early education if hours of daily homework are necessary on top of 8 hours of lessons to achieve similar results.

And Allison had nothing to do with the paper and was quoted total of one time in the article.